Dublin Opinion

I have to admit that reading the news today that the modernist Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni died yesterday at the age of 94 shocked me.

Not because his death occurred within a few hours of the other great European film director Ingmar Bergman, but because I realized I’d never seen any of his films.

Worse than that, I’d never even known of his existence until I read about him on Pleasures of Underachievement. Seanachie, by the way, is a serious film lover and regularly writes excellent posts on the flicks he goes to see in Paris, many of which don’t get an Irish release.

Still, Antonioni’s death, after a very long and productive life, has had one simple benefit: it provides ignorant fools like me with the opportunity to find out more about a great director and encourages us to seek out his films for the first time.

So here is what I’ve been able to find out…

Coming to prominence after the Second World War the work Michelangelo Antonioni, along with Frederico Fellini was seen as a break with the neo-realism of Roberto Rossellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Ermanno Olmi. The debut of L’Avventura at Canne in 1960 was greeted with boos and jeers from an audience of critics who were unwilling to accept the depiction of alienation in modern Italian bourgeoisie society. However, it still went on to win the Jury prize.

These early films of the 60’s, most cohesively in the trilogy L’avventura (The Adventure) and La notte (The Night) and L’Eclisse (The Eclipse) demonstrate Antonioni’s precise critique of the Italian moneyed classes, revealing the personal disconnection, or ennui, of modern men and women as they busy themselves in the newly formed urban landscapes of postwar Italy.

Visually the films, by all accounts and from what I’ve seen on YouTube, seem to celebrate modernist architecture while at the same time vilifying the vacuity of the protagonists. Writing in The Guardian today, Peter Bradshaw assess the Antonioni’s work thus:

“At its best his film-making transmitted a glimpse of what it found to be mysterious and occult forces at work beneath the “real” world.”

The movement of the camera is often slow and lingering, and although most world class directors are usually happy to ignore the conventions of cinematic narrative, Antonioni’s films seem to take a perverse satisfaction in betraying the audience’s expectations. The beauty and elegance of the shots, however, defy any potential frustration at the pace of his film.

A great example of this can be seen in this long clip from The Eclipse.

Perhaps his most famous film is Blow-up, a film made in Britain in 1966 and starring David Hemmings as the fashion photographer Thomas, who, while enjoying the pleasures of 1960s London witnesses what he believes to be a murder.

When it was suggested to him in a 1969 interview that Blow-up is his most unorthodox film, he takes the opportunity to revel in his rule breaking tendencies:

“You are right to say that Blow-up is my most unorthodox film, but it is unorthodox in montage, as well as photography. At the Centro Sperimentale they teach you never to cut a shot during its action. Yet I continually do that in Blow-up. Hemmings starts walking to a phone booth-snip go a few frames-in a flash, he is there. Or take the scene in which he photographs Verushka; I cut many frames during that action, doing what the teachers at the Centro regard as utterly scandalous.”

But of all the films I’ve read about today the most interesting is The Passenger, the 1975 MGM released thriller starring Jack Nicholson. This just shows how the films of Antonioni, though acclaimed and popular during his long career, are still only really known about by cinephiles. Why is this film not as well known as the other great Jack Nicholson films from the 70’s like One Flew Over a Cuckoo’s Nest or Easy Rider?

The story is about David Locke (Nicholson) who, tired of his world weary existence as a famous news reporter decides, while covering the civil war in Chad, to switch his identity with a dead man. The opportunity presents itself when he finds out that the man in the hotel room next to him has died. When he discovers the body he also finds his passport on a desk and looking through it, notices that the man, Robertson, has a very similar physical appearance to himself. So, he decides to switch the details, effectively taking the dead man’s identity. But with his identity he also takes the rest of his life as well. The man is an arms dealer, and as Locke tries to complete the appointments listed in Robertson’s business diary, he finds that its not so easy to abandon the objectivity and professional distance of the reporter for much more proximate and dangerous immanence of the arms dealer.

In an excellent essay on the film in cinema-scope published last year, Robert Koehler also points to parallels that the film has with contemporary events:

“Any thinking audience watching The Passenger now, an audience aware of itself in a new turn of history, will unavoidably see parallels between Robertson’s militarization of “democrats” in an Islamic country and the West’s current military involvement with “democrats” in the Middle East.”

Cinematically, and aesthetically, perhaps the most celebrated scene (from what I’ve read) in The Passenger is the penultimate one, which involves a seven minute long tracking shot starting off from the end of the bed where Locke is lying face up in a Spanish hotel room and going outside to where the Government police who have been following him (presuming him to be Robertson) are scurrying about.

Although the film is broadly considered a thriller Koehler suggests that the scene subverts the conventions of the thriller, as epitomized in many of Hitchcock’s films:

“Antonioni’s “thriller” is not merely dissimilar to Hitchcock: it can be read—and this is reinforced with every viewing—as the most elaborate critique of Hitchcock’s shallowness that any director has ever made. Even as the film “resolves” with the extended shot of Locke/Robertson’s murder in Osuna, Spain at the hands of government agents who had been pursuing him, the very form of this now-classic shot—moving imperceptibly past Locke/Robertson’s legs and feet on his hotel bed, looking out the hotel window toward a criss-crossing of darting bodies and cars and a stationary old man in the plaza of an adjacent bullring, through the window into the plaza itself, past the cars, past Schneider’s student, past Locke’s wife Rachel (Jenny Runacre) arriving with Spanish police, past the surrounding sky and parched landscape, past the front of the hotel until we realize that we are now looking in at where we had been, and looking at a strangely incomplete view of the dead Locke/Robertson lying face-up on the bed.”

Here’s the scene.

You can also get a Sony Classics version of The Passenger on DVD from Amazon.

In the 80s and 90s the film was only really available in a maligned MGM version on video. But Jack Nicholson, with the impulse of an art collector, bought the rights in the late 90s, and it’s now released as a DVD with his commentary on the making of the movie. I think I’ll get a copy to make up for my ignorance.